AOL has launched PLAY for iPhone, a new social experience for music as something perhaps a bit more rewarding than Apple’s Ping. The app taps right into your music hosted on the iPhone, accesses radio stations, shares music with friends and followers, and much more. PLAY has been available on Android for a couple of months, but now hits iPhone. Think Instagram — for music.

The PLAY music player is pretty straight-forward, and doesn’t veer much from Apple’s Music app. While listening to a song in the player you can click the share button, allowing you to post the song recommendation to the PLAY feed, Twitter, and Facebook. In the Feed users can play music that their friends have shared and then quickly buy it on iTunes. Lastly, the PLAY section of the app offers song recommendations, or what they call “MP3 of the Day”. We don’t see users switching to this app just to play music, but we can see the sharing features being a draw.

The app seems pretty cool overall, but who knows if there will be a community behind it. Go download the app to find out.